Theater; The Briton Who Revived 'Oklahoma!'

By BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

Published: March 17, 2002

LONDON—
A LESS tenacious, obstinate or driven director might have given up the battle, but Trevor Nunn was always determined to give New York theatergoers a chance to see the makeover of Rodgers and Hammerstein's ''Oklahoma!,'' which he staged at the National Theater here in 1998. And why not? The production, praised by almost every reviewer for its freshness, moved to the West End, drew the crowds and, Mr. Nunn would like to think, still has something fundamental to say about the values and virtues of America.

Now, at long last, he has achieved his aim. Despite a refusal by Actors' Equity to permit the London production to transfer to Broadway, and despite Mr. Nunn's own commitments as artistic director of the National Theater, ''Oklahoma!'' will open in New York at the Gershwin Theater on Thursday.

Mr. Nunn, 62, had his critics when, soon after his appointment at the National in 1997, he announced he would do ''Oklahoma!'' Some still think that Britain's leading subsidized theater should not have staged it or, for that matter, the other Broadway musicals that he has gone on to direct at the National, ''My Fair Lady'' and ''South Pacific.'' Some have even accused him of populism -- a term that, as he prepares to retire from the National's top job, he clearly finds offensive. As he pointed out in an interview in London recently, only 6 of the 95 works he has presented at the National in the last five years have been musicals, among them Leonard Bernstein's notoriously tricky ''Candide.''

What Mr. Nunn did not mention, however, is that the theater's productions and transfers have won nearly 100 significant awards in Britain and America during his directorship, six for ''Oklahoma!'' and even more for his revival of Tennessee Williams's tough, taxing prison drama, ''Not About Nightingales.''

''Diversity'' is Mr. Nunn's own word for a policy and a program that have embraced Michael Frayn's ''Copenhagen'' and Noël Coward's ''Private Lives,'' Rita Dove's ''Darker Face of the Earth'' and Gorky's ''Summerfolk.''

''Some critics of the National Theater want esoteric and only esoteric,'' Mr. Nunn said. ''Regardless of the box-office implications of such a blinkered view, I profoundly disagree with the concept of an exclusive National Theater. My idea of the National is a theater for everyone, for very different audiences and tastes, for the whole spectrum of taxpayers who contribute to the National's existence.''

''I was brought up in a poor working-class community,'' added Mr. Nunn, whose father was a cabinetmaker from the East Anglian town of Ipswich. ''I want to run a theater that's accessible to the people I grew up with every bit as much as a theater for aficionados.''

And that, too, helps to explain why his National program has included Broadway shows as well as Tom Stoppard's ''Invention of Love,'' Shakespeare's ''Troilus and Cressida'' and Harold Pinter's adaptation of Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past.''

According to statistics collected by the theater, 34 percent of those who saw ''My Fair Lady'' before its transfer to the West End had never been to the National Theater before. ''But many of them have come again,'' Mr. Nunn emphasized.

As for the 1943 ''Oklahoma!,'' Mr. Nunn believes that it represents the American musical at its most original. And since it had not been seen in London for two decades before his revival, it seemed overdue for reassessment. ''There are masterpieces in the genre,'' he said, ''and the National has a responsibility to explore masterpieces of every kind. It's a show with the capacity to be about much more than fun and superficiality. Somehow 'Carousel' avoided the same criticism when the National revived it because it spoke of violence in marriage. Well, 'Oklahoma!' isn't any less unusual or demanding.''

Another reason the piece appealed to him was that it deals with a community: a subject that, he said, has fascinated him throughout a career whose prime achievements have included ''Nicholas Nickleby'' and ''Les Misérables'' (both of which he directed with John Caird), ''Porgy and Bess'' and, recently, a fine revival of ''The Merchant of Venice.''

In ''Oklahoma!,'' both the farmers and the cowmen are painfully adjusting to a brave new world. ''They're in this wondrous place,'' Mr. Nunn said, ''in which there's no law and no authority, and somehow the community has to prove itself worthy of the land. Common sense, justice, equality and decency have to prevail.''

Since Mr. Nunn wanted his revival to be a tribute to those virtues, he felt that authenticity of place was essential. So Anthony Ward's designs include a water tank, cattle fences, an old stove and a whirring windmill -- the community's only source of power. ''We're trying to say, 'This is a real world, with real people, with a real cornfield near the house, with real corn that the girls strip and munch,' '' Mr. Nunn said. ''We also wanted to show that the buildings were temporary little structures in a vast landscape. So we used exaggerated perspective to suggest that some of those structures were far distant and some unimaginably far distant.''